ANAGYWNAS: THE IMPENETRABLE SILENCE OF STONE

The following was included in a performance at the new Staalplaat in Berlin

http://www.lepetitmignon.de/

The improvised preamble, however, ended in this manner:

...I have a few times received suspicious emails from people doing geneaology searches…my surname, Gburek, is Polish…my surname, I was told a few years ago, means something like Grumpy and Obstinate Man…so a few weeks ago I received an email from a woman in Poland searching for her tribes-people and at the end of the exchange she said we must have relatives in common because “after all, you know that Gburek is not a very popular name”… and in fact a Pole I met in Berlin asked me if I knew what my name means in Polish and since I did not know he said, after a slight pause, “he is always a little man who is very rude and farts and belches at the dinner table and speaks very loudly and usually he always ask you for money that he never pays back and he has very bad sexual habits…” and so forth and so on, so you can see Polish people have a very extreme sense of humor and like to exaggerate quite a lot…and when I met the Polish musicians and composers in Darmstadt last year each one of them at least was very quick to laugh when I told them my last name…

Anyways, in Poland, they say that the very first city was built around the vicinity of a great mountain which I will call the Nameless Mountain…I call it nameless because of an intuition that the mountain itself did not care too much about the names given to it

So it is said that Anagywnas—or someone calling himself
Anagywnas (we are not sure also if it was male
or female or both or neither)
Anagywnas said—we assume he said it to someone, but in fact, we don’t know
the name of the people, his tribe, or what kind of creatures they were or if he had a people—
Anagywnas said, the first problem “we” have is the STONE—meaning, the HARD
Mountain before his Eye---
IT WILL NOT MOVE AND IT REFUSES TO SPEAK.
And so….
Anagwynas invented VIOLENCE, thinking maybe Violence would help him find a way
To get from the mountain what was needed.
Now, Violence didn’t want to go. But being an Invention, it was forced, like any other TOOL, toward doing something—while Violence truly didn’t feel like it had anything to prove and might prefer to sleep in the dark matter of the universe…

Anagywnas nevertheless took Violence to the Mountain.
He first made a huge column of AIR and projected this from his LUNGS
Through a kind of TUBE. The Mountain typically replied with SILENCE.
Having heard the reply of SILENCE,
Anagywnas shouted,
“WHAT? …DID YOU SAY: ‘VIOLENCE’? …TO ME?”
When Silence was heard again,
Anagywnas, sure of himself now, and very brave, began to smash Mountain into pieces.
Expending great energies, his Violence was still great, while indifferent.
But then Anagywnas began to see that all the broken pieces were not regular.
Each one was different and worse than expected each one was equally silent, no matter how much violence was applied. He did not find what was needed.
And Anagywnas regretted smashing the Mountain and decided to put it all back together using a mixture of mucous and blood as a kind of glue.
It was difficult work. There was something missing. The shape of the restored Mountain was not like he remembered it. There was a more fragile integrity than before and it was in this that Anagywnas discovered SPACES. Everywhere there were Gaps and Spaces that caused great instability. The Spaces were interesting. Animals started immediately to occupy the Spaces. And so the first city in Poland came to be formed. It was always falling apart, undergoing disruption. The noise of sex and indigestions of the animals underground caused the city to fall apart quite often. Everyone tried to hear Silence
But it was not possible anymore to hear Silence. The arguments over how to put the city together were endless and unhappy. And stones sometimes disappeared. The inability to find silence caused some of the animals to go and find another place to live.
And the animals that succeeded were never heard from again.

Material for sound: stones from Wannsee, Alps, New Mexico, Athens; layed-out guitar with piezo and telephone pick-up; two looping pedals; mixing board; two guitar amplifiers.

Procedures: Speaking, reading, suspending stones above magnetic coils of guitar until vibrational field changes are appreciable in output. This may entail turning stones in various ways. Eventually most stones on top of guitar, experience of these in many configurations produce varieties of textures. Stop when you feel like “it”.

Jeff Gburek
June 21, 2007
Le Petit Mignon//StaalplaatBerlin